Many groups released hardcore albums on the fringe in 1997, from Capitalist Casualties’ scathing A Collection (courtesy of Slap A Ham) to the Southern-fried sludge of Rise And Fall by Damad (which would birth the metal band Kylesa in the coming millennium). But the best of the bunch were Catharsis’ Samsara —a bleak, brutal statement of bestial hardcore— and His Hero Is Gone’s opening one-two punch, Fifteen Counts Of Arson and Monuments To Thieves.

Most of the article is about emo and pop punk bands; Blink 182, Jimmy Eat World, Hot Water Music, etc… But it’s a good read, and a good series too. Check it out.

My friend Erik recently explained Markov Chains to me, especially regarding the ‘ebooks’ Twitter account phenomenon. So of course I had to make my own ebooks bot and feed it a bunch of straight-edge hardcore lyrics.

I tweaked Roger Whitson’s Markov-Tweet Python library to my own liking. The hardest part is getting a large enough corpus so the chains aren’t lifting lines from songs directly. I’ll be adding more lyrics gradually, so the resulting tweets will improve – if you can call more nonsensical lyrics an improvement.